The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age. Clay Shirky’s fantastic post about the costs and structural instability of our current higher education model. The last line is killer:
Arguing that we need to keep the current system going just long enough to get the subsidy the world owes us is really just a way of preserving an arrangement that works well for elites—tenured professors, rich students, endowed institutions—but increasingly badly for everyone else.
A home page was a painting, a statue. My blog was me. My blog was the Web equivalent of my body. Being-on-the-Web was turning out to be even more important and more fun than we’d thought it would be.
I had a fun time talking with Scott Tran about the support team at Automattic. The podcast is about 40 minutes and we covered everything from hiring to team structure to the type of culture we value. It’s live now over on Scott’s site.
This was my first time recording a podcast and it was a lot of fun. Scott has other interviews that focus on support at companies like Basecamp, Olark, and Zapier. If you’re interested you should give them a listen.
Show, don’t tell, with GIFs. Ingenious approach to showing users how to get something done with your product.
How to break the stranglehold of academics on critical thinking:
more than ever, intellectuals should learn from the movements from below. This means not only supporting them “from outside” once they have occurred, as many have done, but conceiving of one’s intellectual activity as part and parcel of a collective intellectuality. Only then will the monopoly of academics on the production of influential critical theories be broken.